Introduction
The representation of women in media has long been a topic of interest, as it reflects societal norms and attitudes towards gender equality. Despite the progress made in recent decades towards gender equality, it is important to examine whether these changes are reflected in the films we watch. Movies provide a unique insight into the subconscious ways in which society is conditioned to view women, and can capture the ideals and norms of the time in which they were produced.
In this data analysis project, we will use the CMU Movie Summary Corpus dataset, as well as additional datasets from Stanford CoreNLP, IMDb, Wikidata, IMDB, and Box Office Mojo, to explore the portrayal of women in film. This includes examining the roles of actresses, characters, and writers and directors. By analyzing these factors, we aim to gain a deeper understanding of how women have been depicted in media over time and how this representation may have evolved. Our analysis will also allow us to consider the ways in which society views and treats women and the progress made towards gender equality.
The Data
Our analysis is based on merging the CMU Dataset, the CMU Dataset, the Stanford CoreNLP-processed summaries, IMDb, Wikidata, IMDB and Box office Mojo. We have separated the data into three tables: the movies table, the characters table, and the directors and writers table.
- The movies table contains titles, release year, runtime, box office revenue, average rating and number of votes on IMDb, genre, as well as the list of directors and writers. There are a total of 81,741 different movies.
- The characters table contains the ID of the movie, the character name and actor name, their height, ethnicity, birth and death year, the movie metric and the actor metric. There are 450,669 characters played by 135,761 different actors.
- The directors and writers table contains titles, role (either director or writer), name, gender, birth year, and height. There are a total of 86,474 directors and 164,271 writers.